Bird of Passage

by Catherine Czerkawska

‘So why do you not remember your father?’

  ‘He was the one that left. He went off to work in England. He could sing. My mother said he sang like John McCormack, Count John McCormack, she always said, but I couldn’t tell you who he was, at all. My father would sing in bars and make a bit of money that way. My mother ran away with him. Her parents didn’t approve, but they went to Dublin, and then they got married.’

  His mother had been at pains to tell Finn how happy she had been and what a fine man his father was. She told Finn that when he was a baby, Ronnie would sit him on his knee and dance him up and down and sing to him. And she would do a bit of the singing herself, to show him.

  ‘Dum dum diddly do, dum dum diddly day...’

  Sometimes Finn thought he could remember feeling safe, with two arms around him, and the cheerful voice singing in his ear, but mostly he knew that he was only remembering his mother’s version of the tale.

  ‘Do you look like him?’ asked Kirsty.

  ‘I never saw a picture.’

  ‘Did your mother not talk to you about him?’

  In spite of the fact that he had died when she was so young, Kirsty’s father was a very real presence in the house. There was a photograph in a silver frame on Isabel’s bedside table, a wedding picture of James and Isabel, looking uncomfortable in their fancy clothes. The photograph was black and white, but you could see that Isabel had fat dark curls, while James looked just like Alasdair, so he had been the sandy one, the one who gave Kirsty her red hair. On the sideboard, were trophies that James had won for ploughing, and there was a pair of his working boots with the mud still caked on their soles, in the wooden blanket chest in the upstairs hallway.

  ‘I used to ask about him, and she would answer me. But it made her sad when she talked about him, so after a while I just stopped asking.’

  His mother was sitting at the window and sewing. It was summer, the window was open, and the creamy net curtain was billowing inwards. There was the clack, clack of the old treadle machine as her foot went up and down, up and down. Where had the machine come from? A man had brought it into the house, hauling it up the stairs. Had that man been his father? He didn’t think so. He had a fleeting impression of somebody coming into the room with a heavy, wooden case. There was a smell of wax polish off it, a nice smell. His mother would use the machine to make cross-over pinafores for herself in blue or red gingham, and shirts for Finn, for going to church on Sundays.

  He had liked going to church on Sundays, even though he got a bit bored. He liked the smell of incense, and the candles that you could light for your ‘special intention’ if you put a penny in the box, and the confessionals that looked like miniature wooden churches. He imagined them peopled with tiny congregations. He liked to watch the priest in his green dress with white lace beneath, and the altar boys with their lacy dresses, although he was never very sure why all these boys had to wear dresses like girls, but maybe they were just made that way. He even enjoyed listening to the priest’s wavery voice, singing the mass in a foreign language that Sister Rosalie told them was called Latin, a dead language, she said, wistfully, but he didn’t know who had killed it. His mother would nudge him, and he would look up at her and she would pull a face at him and make him giggle. The church was warm and comforting. Sometimes he would even fall asleep in there, leaning against his mammy’s side, her arm around him, his head tucked in close to her soft chest, his cheek against the prickliness of her grey wool costume.

  ‘But didn’t you have grandparents? Didn’t your mother have her own family?’

  ‘I told you. They lived near Ballyhaunis. But I never met them.’

  ‘So where did you live? When you were a wee boy? You must remember that, surely.’

  ‘I remember the room we had. It was in Dublin. Just the two of us. The woman downstairs looked after me while my mammy went out to work.’

  His mother had a job in a factory and she had to go out very early to get the bus. She used to wrap Finn up in a blanket and carry him downstairs to the neighbour who looked after him. The whole house smelled of smoke and cabbage and a dusty smell, like old feathers. He could see it in his mind’s eye, as well as smell it. Their room was right at the top of the house. It got very hot in summer and very cold in winter. He could close his eyes and he was back there, lying in bed, in summer, listening to the noises in the street, below. If he closed his eyes he could feel his mother’s arms. She had soft arms with little freckles on them. And he could smell her – a mixture of cigarettes and perfume.

  ‘Go to sleep now, my lamb!’ That’s what she always said to him. She would push the hair back from his face. ‘Go to sleep now, my little soldier.’

  ‘You look sad,’ said Kirsty, breaking into his thoughts.

  ‘No. I’m alright.’

  ‘You’re away from that place now. That school. You don’t need to go back there, ever. You’re safe.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I suppose you wonder where your mother is.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? If you were in my shoes?’

  ‘You’ve never heard from her since?’

  ‘No. But it wasn’t unusual, Kirsty. Nobody did. We were supposed to forget.’

  ‘How could you forget something like that?’

  Finn said nothing. Just stared out to sea. But Kirsty was right. How could you ever forget something like that? And yet there was something he had forgotten. Something he had done, or not done. Something terrible which was all his fault. And about that, he could remember nothing at all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  One Sunday afternoon in early May, when Finn had been living and working at Dunshee for a couple of years, Kirsty carried him off on an expedition to find the well of the winds, an ancient site in the north of the island. Alasdair was fond of telling tales about it.

  ‘In the old days, when my grandfather’s grandfather was a boy,’ he said, ‘the sea captains who might be becalmed on the island would go to the well and ask for a wind to carry them away. There were two old women who were guardians, and they would uncover it, if you paid them a little money, and then they would clear the water with a clam shell and mutter their spells over it, and the wind would blow. But they were always careful to cover the well when they had finished, for if they didn’t, the waters would overflow and flood the whole world.’

  Kirsty had never been there before, but her grandfather had given her directions. They cycled to the north end of the island, Finn borrowing Alasdair’s old bone shaker, left their bikes in a ditch and walked along the boundary wall between one farm and the next, as far as the lower slopes of a hill called Carn Na Faire or the Watch Cairn. The well was supposed to be situated low down on the hill. When she was little, Kirsty had imagined a circular stone structure, like the pictures in her book of nursery rhymes, ‘Pussy’s in the well.’ But Alasdair had described a spring, a trickle of fresh water emerging from below a big boulder.

  The lower slopes of the hill were hard going, threaded with gorse and willows, tangled with brambles which were just coming into leaf. Soon they would be white with blossom but they were armed with a million thorns. The spaces between were scattered with celandines and bluebells, with buttery primroses and dark violets, good enough to eat, patches, drifts, hillocks of them. Kirsty sat down for a momentary rest, and it looked to Finn as though she were drowning in yellow and purple flowers.

  ‘Isn’t this glorious!’ she said, running her hands over them. ‘Isn’t this just glorious?’

  Finn had his fishing knife with him, and cut down some of the willows, so that they could pass. They scoured the lower slopes of the hill, listening for the sound of running water. There were plenty of stones and damp places, but they could see nothing that looked as though it might be the Well of the Winds. And then, Kirsty noticed a patch of hillside where the willows seemed to be growing in a rudimentary circle. Stumbling over tussocks, she struggled between the branches. Finn followed, finding the going harder because he was so much bigger
. The wind dropped and quite suddenly, they found themselves in a sheltered place, warm and quiet.

  Dropping into the silence came the faint sound of running water. Ahead of them, a large boulder, embroidered with livid green moss, was tucked into the hillside, and below it they could see a line of muddy patches. Finn crouched down and began to scoop out the mud and grass at the base of the boulder. Soon, he had uncovered a flat stone. A trickle of water bubbled out from beneath it and, even as he cleared away the accumulation of leaves and moss, a pool formed miraculously beneath his hands. The bottom was clean and sandy.

  ‘Is it fresh?’ asked Kirsty.

  He looked up at her. ‘I don’t know. ‘

  ‘Well, drink some and see.’

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘Course you should. I’m going to.’

  She was down beside him, steadying herself on his shoulder, kneeling down to scoop up a handful of the water. He saw the silvery droplets fall from her fingers as she carried them to her mouth.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s lovely. Try it.’

  He did as he was told. She was right. The water was very cold but fresh and good.

  ‘Do you suppose it is magical?’ she asked.

  ‘What’s it supposed to do?’

  ‘It’s a cure-all. Whatever’s wrong with you, it’ll heal you. That’s what they believed in the olden days.

  ‘I don’t feel any different.’

  ‘You have to give it time. And you’d better put the capstone back on or it’ll flood the whole world.’

  ‘Not likely,’ he said, grinning, but he did as he was told and slid the stone back into place. Nevertheless, the water still oozed in a thin trickle from beneath it.

  Finn was a quiet lodger and a willing worker, but the more Alasdair and Kirsty sang his praises, the more Isabel set her lips in a thin line and endured his presence. Always polite, he did whatever she told him without complaint. He offered to carry her shopping up from the village for her. He cut cabbages or dug carrots or brought a boiling of potatoes from the fields and washed them under the tap in the yard, but there was nothing he could do to endear himself to her and eventually he just stopped trying.

  Isabel would have found it very hard to define exactly what she disliked about him, but she knew that in every way that mattered to her, Finn did not come up to the mark. She pitied his past, but she could not love this changeling who had invaded her home. He was too self contained. There was nothing remotely sweet about him, nothing vulnerable or loveable, as there had been about Francis. She had been drawn to the other boy’s helplessness, as she never would be to Finn. She could have mothered Francis, but Finn neither wanted nor needed mothering, and Isabel sensed a certain resentment, simmering below his deferential surface. He was in the habit of obedience, that was all. But it did not come naturally to him. He was like a dog, beaten into submission, but with retaliation on his mind.

  Although she would have admitted it to nobody, not even herself, Isabel was dissatisfied with her life. Sometimes, she would wake at three or four in the morning to a sense of futility, a downward spiral of days, from which there was no escape. She had been widowed for many years now, and for a long while, she had wanted nothing more than to live in peace and quiet. The shock of the accident, the adjustments that had to be made, all of this upheaval had taken time and emotional energy. But now, a change had come over her. It was not that she was consciously searching for a new husband. But she was increasingly aware of her own isolation. Sooner or later, Kirsty would fly the nest. Isabel felt trapped in the circumscribed world of the island, where everyone knew her history and her business, and she knew everyone else’s. Sometimes she longed for the relief of anonymity, for the opportunity to make a fresh start, to re-fashion herself in some way, go to new places, do new things, meet new people.

  I’m still a young woman, she thought. And look at me! Hair like a haystack. Baggy cardigans. Tweed skirts and wellington boots. I’ve nothing nice and if I had, there would be nowhere to wear it.

  Her infrequent trips to her cousins in Glasgow disturbed her even more. She would wander around clothes shops, touching the fine fabrics, sometimes trying on a coat or a dress. During her most recent visit, she had gone to a hairdresser, asking for a new style. Her cousin had taken her into a department store where a young woman with plum coloured lips and nails to match, had done her make-up. She had stared back at this strange, new face in the mirror, half delighted, half horrified by the blue eyeshadow, the kohl liner, the long lashes, all framed by a sleek bob. But as soon as she got back to the island, the wind and rain transformed her hair into a mass of frizz again. She often wished she could move away and start afresh, but the thought of the upheaval frightened her. How could she do such a thing to Alasdair? He had no sense of her dissatisfaction. Perhaps she hid it too well.

  Her only close friend was an older woman called Agnes who cooked for the Laurences at Ealachan.

  ‘Time you found yourself a new man!’ Agnes said, as they sat over a pot of tea in the kitchen of the big house, in the quiet spell between lunch and dinner. ‘You’ve been stuck up there are Dunshee for too long. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t marry again. Plenty of people do, Issie.’

  But Isabel didn’t know where or how she would find a man in this place, where everyone seemed either too young or too old, too married or too eccentric. She had worked at Ealachan herself, before her marriage to James, and there had been a time, quite a long time, when she had thought herself madly in love with Malcolm Laurence. It was a crush, really but the thought of him still gave her a small quiver of desire in the pit of her stomach. Once, he had patted her backside as he passed her on the stairs, a casual caress, so light that she could hardly believe he had done it, not knowing whether to be flattered or outraged. But she knew that none of it meant anything. His wife, Viola, was a formidable woman, stick thin and stylish, with fine blonde hair, a long straight nose, and skin like a piece of porcelain. Isabel always found her just a little inhuman. She kept Malcolm on a very tight rein indeed. No matter what her dreams and fantasies might be, Isabel knew that Malcolm had never seen her as more than a pretty face, or a nice soft body.

  Now, seeing Kirsty grow into a young woman, Isabel found herself bitterly regretting the loss of that little red headed girl, who had once toddled so joyfully about the farm. She couldn’t help it. It just came upon her sometimes, swept over her, like a bereavement. It was both a pleasure and a pain in her heart, the way her baby had grown and was now slipping away from her. She had invested so much love in this only child. But once her darling bird had flown, there would be nobody to fill the gap in her life. Certainly not Finn.

  At school Kirsty had chosen art as one of her subjects and – on the advice of Miss Wilson - had applied to study Fine Art at Edinburgh University. She would have preferred to try for the Glasgow School of Art, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘You read such things in the papers about art students!’ she said, disapprovingly.

  To Kirsty, it seemed marvellous that she should be able to study something she adored and get a grant to do it as well. On the whole, her grandfather agreed with Miss Wilson. He had begun to take a passionate interest in Kirsty’s future. He was fairly bursting with pride in her.

  ‘There will be no prouder man than me, on the day you graduate,’ he said.

  ‘Grandad, I haven’t even got there yet!’

  ‘What about Finn?’ said Isabel, slyly. ‘You’ll be leaving him far behind, won’t you? He’ll miss you!’

  It was a low blow and unworthy of her, but she couldn’t resist using a weapon which she had unexpectedly discovered in her armoury.

  Kirsty hesitated. ‘I’ll miss him too. But then I’m away half the time as it is. He’ll be here when I come home. You all will. I’ll be back before you know it.’

  In September of that year, one of the Glasgow cousins came to the island in his white van to take Kirsty to Edinburgh. All
that day, Finn had been noticeable only by his absence. Even when Kirsty’s belongings were packed and they were eating their evening meal, there was no sign of him.

  ‘Skiving!’ Isabel was furious.

  ‘Leave him alone’ said Alasdair. ‘You know what’s wrong with him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know.’ Alasdair nodded in Kirsty’s direction.

  ‘Och, well, he’ll just have to get used to it, won’t he? We will, so he’ll have to.’

  Kirsty said nothing. Leaving the island was one thing. She had been ready to spread her wings for some time now. But leaving Finn was quite another. Sadness at their imminent parting flooded through her. As soon as she could decently do so, she left the table and went in search of him.

  It was a warm evening. The last of the swallows were assembling on the wires but the nights were already drawing in and soon it would be dark. She wandered through the outbuildings, calling his name, and at last climbed up to Hill Top Town. Sure enough, she found him standing on the very rim of the saucer of land, staring out to sea, as she had found him that first evening, all those years ago.

  ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’

  She tried to slip her hand into his, but he shrugged it off, thrusting his hands into his pockets. During this last summer, she had changed, physically, as well as mentally. She had a broad, pale face almost disfigured by freckles. Her eyes were dark green and whenever she smiled she displayed white, slightly uneven teeth. But her face was handsome rather than pretty, and it was her hair that was her chief beauty. She still had her dense red curtain of hair, long and glorious: far prettier than the rest of her. Sometimes when he looked at her now, Finn hardly knew her. Had she but known it, he and Isabel were sharing something of the same regret for the Kirsty they had lost.

  ‘You’re upset.’

  ‘I’m alright. I’ll miss you, but I know you have to go. I’ve always known it. Always known this would happen.’